Wanted: Dairy Clouds

Wanted: Dairy

New Yorkers had been told to give up tub baths for showers, forbidden to wash their cars, urged to go unshaven one day a week; they had been coaxed, wheedled and threatened. All the irritating wartime apparatus of publicity stunts and insistent radio commercials and all the meddling busybodies who liked to demand public sacrifices had been put to work to save the city's dwindling water supply. And still New York City's reservoirs contained only enough water to keep the metropolis going for 90 days. Last week, feeling just a little bit ridiculous but also a little bit desperate, the city hurriedly set out to tap the sky over its 571-sq.-mile Catskill Mountains watershed--history's first attempt to utilize systematically "triggered" clouds as a direct and steady source of water.

Rainmaker at Work. The great cloud-milking experiment was born last month when Mayor William O'Dwyer remembered how Nobel Prizewinning Scientist Irving Langmuir had caused 320 billion gallons of rain (enough to fill New York's reservoirs with 60 billion gallons to spare) to fall on arid New Mexico by burning $20 worth of silver iodide. Scientist Langmuir, just retired from General Electric Research Laboratory at 68, did not feel up to taking on New York's job himself, but on his recommendation the city hired as its chief rainmaker a 35-year-old, Harvard-trained meteorologist, Dr. Wallace Howell, at $100 a day.

Last week Dr. Howell, trailed by an entourage of officials and reporters, was hustling around in the snowy Catskills, looking for a mountaintop on which to set up radar equipment (used in spotting rain-laden clouds). The city had made a deal with a Boston weather service to tell them when clouds were heading toward the Catskills; it was converting two of its four police department airplanes to use in dropping dry-ice pellets and silver-iodide ejectors, and two city trucks to use in cloud-tickling from the ground with silver iodide when flying was not feasible.

Lawmakers at Work. These preparations were not begun without stirring up piercing yells of alarm. Albany's Mayor Erastus Corning was in a terrible swivet --he accused New York City of aiming to turn upstate New York into a desert by drying up the clouds before they got there. Some residents of the city's watershed area seemed to think that they faced only two alternatives: build arks or drown in a Howell-made deluge.

To protect itself, the city was trying to get a bill passed banning damage suits based on artificial rains. The Republican administration countered with a bill which would give the state complete control over all artificial rainmaking. Undisturbed by such legalisms Meteorologist Howell pressed on with his plans, hoped to begin "stimulating" clouds this week. If his rainmaking solved New York's shortage, it might affect the fortunes of all the world's cities. If the competition became keen, it would also raise a horrendous lawyer's question: Who owns the clouds?

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